A great talent says farewell

Julie Kent & José Manuel Carreño during his farewell at the Met

The New York Times
July 1, 2011
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Crowd Favorite Takes His Leave

“The love for José Manuel Carreño poured across the Metropolitan Opera House stage in almost palpable waves as one by one, his fellow dancers, his colleagues and his daughters delivered bouquets of flowers at the end of his final New York performance on Thursday with American Ballet Theater, where he had been a principal since 1995.

There are few dancers as adored by both balletomanes and the general public as Mr. Carreño. Handsome, but not untouchably so; charming; infallibly courteous; a superb partner with a virile stage presence and a reliably plush, polished technique, he has been one of the standard-bearers of Ballet Theater’s reputation for brilliant male dancers.

His role of choice for his departure was Prince Siegfried in “Swan Lake.” That wasn’t taking the easy route; the part is full of the big jumps that are always the first technical casualty for male dancers as they get older. (Mr. Carreño is just 43, but that’s a lifetime of back strain from lifting ballerinas over his head.)

Mr. Carreño can still jump, although he no longer has the buoyancy he possessed years ago. His line is impeccable, his turns a thing of beauty: perfectly centered and upright as he spins, the unsupported leg outlining perfect geometric shapes. When he does execute a jump turn called “tour en l’air,” he lands with a luxurious bend in perfect fifth position, bang on the music.

Those details are a thrill for ballet nerds. More important, every step is permeated by an innate elegance and authority. You have no doubt, watching Mr. Carreño, that he is a star, although of the nicest, most un-divo-like kind.

On Thursday there were two dancers embodying the dual role of Odette-Odile. (Once customary, such casting is rare today.) Presumably this was Mr. Carreño’s choice — Julie Kent as the innocent Odette, Gillian Murphy as her evil alter ego, Odile — as was the guest appearance of the former Ballet Theater dancer Joaquin de Luz (now a New York City Ballet principal) as the prince’s friend Benno.

Oddly, the emotional rapport onstage that Mr. Carreño shared with Mr. de Luz (who danced with energy and panache) was far greater than what he had with Ms. Kent, a longtime partner who is celebrating her 25th anniversary with Ballet Theater this season. With her lyrical, elongated lines, Ms. Kent can look picture-perfect, but so mannered and grand ballerina was her performance, so languorous the tempo of music and dancing, that you could doze off between positions.

This didn’t help Mr. Carreño, who has never been a great actor, but things perked up considerably in Act III with the arrival of Ms. Murphy and of David Hallberg as the sorcerer von Rothbart. (Isaac Stappas played his nonhuman alter ego). Both Ms. Murphy and Mr. Hallberg put an over-the-top spin on their roles, neatly skirting the line between vulgarity and fun, as Mr. Hallberg seduced the Queen (Susan Jaffe, a former Odette-Odile of Mr. Carreño’s) and the princesses with callous magnetism and hilariously exaggerated timing.

Ms. Murphy and Mr. Carreño offered no less. For once that gala staple, the black swan pas de deux, was the showstopper it’s meant to be. In the coda Ms. Murphy offered quadruple and quintuple fouettés, and Mr. Carreño rose to the occasion with a bravura exhibition of his own that seemed as much an expression of excitement about finding his Swan Queen as it was a display of audience-pleasing feats.

This production of “Swan Lake,” by Ballet Theater’s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, so effectively ruins Act IV as to make the dancers quite inconsequential. It’s a pity that Mr. Carreño’s final exit here is to turn his back on the audience, run up a ramp (left! sharp right!) and throw himself into the lake in bad lighting, but so be it.

The audience members — who screamed, threw flowers, held up phones to record the moment and sobbed as Mr. Carreño, looking overwhelmed, opened his arms to us all — weren’t going to let him go so easily anyway.”

Personal comment: This is the performance I mentioned last year [in my entry for September 9, 2010] when I was talking about the dual role of Odette/Odile usually being danced by the same ballerina in productions of Swan Lake performed by major companies and smaller ones who have ballerinas up to the task. I wish I could have seen this perf as the combination of Murphy as Odile and Hallberg as von Rothbart not to mention the marvelous talent of José Manuel Carreño was an occasion not to be missed. Sigh!

ABT’s new Nutcracker: a review

Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg as Clara and her Nutcracker

The New York Times
December 24, 2010
A ‘Nutcracker’ Sprouts Alter Egos
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Once you’ve seen a number of different “Nutcrackers,” you might think you know all the main ways that the old ballet can be retold. But you don’t.

In Alexei Ratmansky’s new version of “The Nutcracker,” currently in its world premiere season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Ballet Theater has a production like no other. Made with complete theatrical authority from first to last, it shows many aspects of Mr. Ratmansky: satirist, storyteller, dramatist, poet. I’m impatient to see it again, but a large part of the delight it affords on first viewing lies in not knowing what’s going to happen.

This work (to which critics were first admitted on Thursday) isn’t a “Nutcracker” that leads us back to the original story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though it takes a few unusual points from there. Instead its basic structure is that of numerous Russian “Nutcrackers” since the Stalinist era: little Clara (the Russians usually call her Masha) no sooner sees the Nutcracker, once he’s transformed into a Prince, than they fall in love-love-love and at once turn into adults. Never mind going to meet any Sugar Plum Fairy — instead they get to dance the music of her pas de deux themselves.

But Mr. Ratmansky takes that formula, tweaks it and makes it new. When his boy (transformed) and girl meet, they’re kindred spirits but from different worlds. They suddenly become doubled — they acquire mature alter egos, a twist that transforms the ballet’s sense of time and space. They’re like the hero and heroine of Philip Pullman’s superlative trilogy, “His Dark Materials” — young lovers from parallel universes.

At first it seems marvelous that we see the grown-ups they’ll become, but then Mr. Ratmansky takes us one step further and shows us how those adults still feel like the children they were. Their grand pas de deux is alternately formal and informal: they show the big, classically perfect dance shapes, arcs, gestures and steps that reveal their ideal qualities, but they also just can’t help expressing their own lesser-mortal amazement about this.

The main story is still focused on their younger selves. Mr. Ratmansky has animated the entire company. (I don’t enjoy a few supporting performances, but at every moment they’re precisely considered.) Yet amid several superb interpretations on Thursday, none surpassed those of the two central children. Young Catherine Hurlin’s partly angry, partly vulnerable, never picture-perfect Clara exemplifies the individuality of Mr. Ratmansky’s approach. Tyler Maloney as her Nutcracker Boy has the same courage and the same vulnerability. Mr. Ratmansky asks him to sustain one particular pose — arms open, face upturned, not facing the audience but on a diagonal — that suggests his mix of astonishment and gratitude, and it strikes home as something unusual in ballet, a private moment that is emotionally huge but not being sold to the public.

When these two children find themselves in the Land of Snow, it’s not a winter wonderland for them — it’s an adventure, now frightening, now freezing. The poetry of Mr. Ratmansky’s vision here is very striking: no Snowflakes were ever more ambiguous, and they have been given pouncing jumps, spinning arcs, and insistent gestures that make us feel we’re in the land of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen.”

Later this young heroine and hero do meet a Sugar Plum Fairy — in this case, an exotically regal, nondancing one. It’s thanks to her presentation that suddenly they have another moment out of time and see their adult selves united in love and, finally, marriage.

As the older Clara and Nutcracker, Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg gave performances on Thursday that count immediately among the high-water marks of their already distinguished careers. Mr. Ratmansky has given them roles that wonderfully yoke their dual commitment to ballet classicism and to dramatic sincerity. There are spectacular throws and catches in the pas de deux, and yet acrobatics aren’t the point here; what you think about is the spontaneity of love’s first excitement.

Mr. Hallberg’s solo starts with a slow fall sideways that’s exactly what nobody expects to see in a ballet, but this quirky impetus becomes the humanizing force within the beautifully bobbing series of jumps that follow. Just as Ms. Murphy’s Clara finishes the main part of her solo (one of the blander passages of the work, admittedly), she goes right off into the wings, then sticks her head out as if sharing a joke with us. She pops straight back on and tears up the stage in a circuit of jumps and turns in which her own terrific academic clarity and fullness become charged with renewed rapture.

Mr. Hallberg starts the coda with a solo of extraordinarily shimmering delicacy, building up to a more conventional display of heroic jumps around the stage (danced with unconventional finesse). Yet not long after, within the very same number, both he and Ms. Murphy, amid a busy phrase, suddenly stand on flat feet and reel a little — as if unable to believe what’s happening to them. These dances keep saying both, “This is perfect,” and, “We can’t believe this is happening”; you feel how full their hearts are.

The production seizes your attention surely from its opening kitchen scene. True, I don’t care for the two synchronized dancing maids. (Here and in some other character dances, Léonide Massine’s choreography comes to mind, not for the first time when watching Mr. Ratmansky’s.) But the whole “Upstairs, Downstairs” layering of this household, funny and touching, is vividly, intimately introduced to us here — and there’s a memorable preview of the mice. Richard Hudson’s sets and costumes perfectly complement the choreography, giving us a partly caricatured Dickensian world that changes unexpectedly into the silver birches of a Russian winterscape.

The cartoon quality in those maids becomes more irksome when whole groups of children repeat the same gestures in unison. Then, as Mr. Ratmansky’s version proceeds, these notes of caricature become part of a pattern. The effect of this is to make Clara and the Nutcracker — like Alice in Wonderland — by far the most real and three-dimensional figures onstage. The parents and Drosselmeyer are all vivid, but these grown-ups are almost as not-quite-real as the mice and the Snowflakes and the Sweets.

That’s fine, moment by moment and dance by dance. There are various kinds of laughs to be had from the Arabian and Russian dances, as well as from Mother Ginger (whose skirts contain a real surprise). But we never sense that Clara and the Nutcracker have become visitors to a realm of purer, larger forms. Though Mr. Hudson’s Sweet Kingdom designs are bright, they have none of the poetic dimensions of his Snow Scene. Even the main point of the Waltz of the Flowers is primarily just fun — with busy, silly male bees pollinating happy, silly, jubilant female flowers — though arranged with absorbing complexity.

The entertainment level doesn’t flag. Missing, at any rate on a first view, is the all-embracing generosity of spirit that marks many good “Nutcrackers.” Instead — and it’s a beautiful paradox — the large moments of Mr. Ratmansky’s version are intimate ones.

This version will repay re-watching. Ormsby Wilkins and the American Ballet Theater Orchestra were at their very finest on Thursday, apparently loving — without rushing — the score’s rhythmic interplay and fantastic instrumentation.

Several alternate casts of dancers follow, probably bringing other nuances. I plan to see at least one more of them this year and hope that it won’t be long before I have the chance to see this exceptional first cast again.

Personal comment: I think he liked it! Merry Christmas everyone!

Jose Manuel Carreño to retire

Jose Manuel Carreño with Natalia Osipova in Don Quixote during ABT’s 2010 Spring Season


JOSE MANUEL CARREÑO TO RETIRE AS PRINCIPAL DANCER WITH AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE

New York Farewell Scheduled for Thursday, June 30, 2011 at Metropolitan Opera House

Jose Manuel Carreño, a Principal Dancer with American Ballet Theatre since 1995, will retire from the Company in August 2011 following performances on the Company’s tour to Asia. A New York farewell is scheduled for Thursday evening,

June 30, 2011 at the Metropolitan Opera House. The evening will be highlighted by a special performance of Swan Lake featuring Carreño in the role of Prince Siegfried dancing opposite Julie Kent as Odette and Gillian Murphy as Odile.

Jose Manuel Carreño was born in Cuba, where he received his training at the Provincial School of Ballet and the National Ballet School. He won the Gold Medal at the New York International Ballet Competition in 1987 and the Grand Prix at the International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi in 1990.

Carreño joined English National Ballet in 1990, where his repertoire included Solor in “The Kingdom of the Shades” from La Bayadère, the Prince in Cinderella, Franz in Coppélia, Albrecht in Giselle, the Prince in The Nutcracker, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and leading roles in A Stranger I Came, Études, Graduation Ball and Prince Igor. In 1993, he joined The Royal Ballet as a principal dancer where his repertoire included the Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty, Basilio in Don Quixote, Oberon and Puck in The Dream and a leading role in Herman Schmerman.

Carreño joined American Ballet Theatre as a Principal Dancer in June 1995. His repertoire with the Company includes the title role in Apollo, the leading role in Ballet Imperial, Solor in La Bayadère, Franz in Coppélia, Conrad, Ali, the Slave, and Lankendem in Le Corsaire, Basilio in Don Quixote, the third sailor in Fancy Free, Albrecht in Giselle, Des Grieux in Manon, the Cavalier in The Nutcracker, the pas de deux Diana and Acteon, Grand Pas Classique, Other Dances, Sinatra Suite and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Sergei in On the Dnieper, the Man From the House Opposite in Pillar of Fire, the Warrior Chieftain in Polovtsian Dances, the Son in Prodigal Son, Jean de Brienne in Raymonda, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Prince Désiré in The Sleeping Beauty, Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, the second movement in Symphony in C, the first and second variations in Variations for Four and leading roles in Push Comes to Shove, Theme and Variations, Without Words, Clear, Études, Overgrown Path, Petite Mort and Rabbit and Rogue. He created a leading role in Within You Without You: A Tribute to George Harrison.

Carreño has appeared as a guest artist with companies throughout the world. Following his retirement from American Ballet Theatre, he plans to continue performing as a guest artist.


Personal Comment: In my September 3, 2010 post ‘Review of Black Swan’ Natalie Portman’s new ballet film due in U.S. theaters on December 1st, 2010 I wrote:

“Nina (Natalie Portman) being picked out of the corps to dance Odette/Odile is a huge stretch (but this is Hollywood) because the demands on stamina, technique and emotional range of the dual role are so great. In some companies the role is divided when a single dancer isn’t up to the demands of both, but doing that advertises both the limitations of the dancer and the lack of depth of talent in the company. In a major company that would never happen unless the ballerina in the role for that performance became injured”.

Well, if you have read this far you know there is another (rare) occasion when the twin roles of Odette/Odile may be divided between two Principal ballerinas; when a beloved male Principal is retiring and wants two of his favorite partners to dance with him during his final performance as a company member. Moreover, in this instance it emphasizes the depth of talent among ABT’s ballerinas Julie Kent being the personification of goodness while Gillian Murphy (in Gaynors) is the embodiment of a far darker spirit.

Osipova’s Juliet

Osipova and Hallberg in Romeo and Juliet

The New York Times
July 11, 2010
By GIA KOURLAS

“Fatal Amour With Fever of Youth

In an interview a few years ago the young Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova spoke a few prophetic words: “I would love to suffer onstage.”

On Saturday afternoon at the Metropolitan Opera House she was given that chance, making an astonishing debut as Juliet opposite David Hallberg in American Ballet Theater’s sumptuous production of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the company’s last performance of the season. Sometimes in ballet casting turns out just the way you hoped; it is a delight to report that she is more than a hoper.

Ms. Osipova is in possession of a singular free-floating jump; as ballerinas go, she is of the air. But in “Romeo and Juliet” she was an exquisite figure to watch, in part, because she knew how to speak with her feet. In a way, her resplendent turn as Juliet was more meaningful than the part itself, proving that the buoyancy of her dancing can succeed in roles that aren’t strictly bravura ones. Of course she wasn’t alone. In Mr. Hallberg, whose daring Romeo was a stretch from the princely parts that come so naturally to him, she had a superb partner.

Throughout the ballet Ms. Osipova’s dramatic sensitivity, full of nuance, was nearly complete; in her portrayal you could discern the great dancer-actress Alessandra Ferri somewhere in the background. (That former Ballet Theater principal, who worked closely with MacMillan, taught her the role from scratch.) From the first to the third acts Ms. Osipova’s emotional shifts were unmistakable yet subtle, allowing one to feel the emotions of the familiar story just as much as watch it unfold.

At the start, moments before Juliet is presented to her suitor Paris (performed by a much too brusque Sascha Radetsky), Ms. Osipova was a bundle of playful, nervous energy, nearly flying across the stage in coupé jeté en tournant jumps. Her expressions are amazing; there is something of Bjork in her pert nose, impish smile and the way her eyes flicker from innocence to amusement in a matter of seconds.

It’s also the kind of face, so full of life, that makes you feel a surge of joy: in the first act, when Juliet begins to realize that she must grow up, the elfin Ms. Osipova was a child-woman, naïve and enchanting, like Audrey Tautou in “Amélie.” Later, after locking eyes with Romeo at the Capulet ball, her face underwent so material a change that in a flash, almost jarring, she was suddenly, briefly, an adult.

In the third-act bedroom scenes, when Juliet, left alone, vacillates between bravery and fear and must decide whether to drink the sleeping potion that will free her from having to marry Paris, Ms. Osipova was something of a wild animal. Here, the texture of her acting and dancing was piercing: disheveled from her night with Romeo and horrified by the thought of death, she tossed the vial onto the floor and ran fearfully to crouch next to her bed. As she inched her way forward and back, it was astonishing to see willpower slowly spread through her body. With a hasty shudder she swallowed the liquid and collapsed.

As Romeo, Mr. Hallberg was at his most fresh, exhibiting his confidence through clear, clean jumps and an ardor that matched. He stood out even more against the other men in the cast, who offered watered-down versions of the characters (Jared Matthews’s Mercutio and Blaine Hoven’s Benvolio) or blandly harsh (Patrick Ogle’s Tybalt).

In his masked dance at the ball Mr. Hallberg made the first move with gleaming leaps and turns — his weapons for seduction. And during the rapturous balcony scene, as he drew Ms. Osipova into his arms, raising her higher as she arched back, he was rhapsodic, she meltingly fragile. By the end, dancing only for each other, they were windswept.

Physically Mr. Hallberg and Ms. Osipova are opposites; while he is tall and fair, she is raven-haired, possessing a delicate frame. But the courage to bare all whenever they step onstage gives them a resolute harmony. As young ballet stars they show a longing to push past the point of comfort in their roles, especially those as fraught with history and emotion as Romeo and Juliet. You can sense their impatience, their devotion and, finally, their desire not to settle for a performance on the surface.

Despite the roar that greeted them in their curtain calls, Mr. Hallberg and Ms. Osipova, their hair matted with sweat and their makeup running, were visibly dazed and drained. That’s what happens, it seems, for having suffered onstage. They danced to their deaths.”

Natalia Osipova – her back story

Bolshoi Principal Natalia Osipova

The New York Times
June 17, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

A Determined Ballerina, Propelled to the Top

THE Bolshoi ballerina Natalia Osipova smiled brightly, theatrically, projecting outward as she danced the solo that Princess Aurora performs moments after arriving on stage in Act I of “The Sleeping Beauty.”

In a plain black leotard and a shabby practice tutu, Ms. Osipova was working before a single ballet mistress, Irina Kolpakova, in a rehearsal studio many floors under the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. There, on Saturday night, she will dance this role with American Ballet Theater, with which she is spending a second season as a guest artist.

Ms. Osipova was suffering from a throat sore enough to warrant a doctor’s appointment immediately after the rehearsal. Later she would cry, feeling ill and frustrated at her inability to perform the steps as she would like. And a week later she would be the victim of a mugging that would leave her bruised and shaken. But for the moment she was Aurora, shy and curious, looking tentatively at the four suitors with whom she will dance the Rose Adagio.

Ms. Osipova’s single-minded focus in rehearsal comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen her perform. Since she burst on to the international dance scene in show-stopping performances of Kitri in “Don Quixote,” during a 2007 Bolshoi tour to London, the sheer energy and intensity of her stage presence has been as remarkable as her improbable floating jump and astounding technical prowess.

“Resistance is futile; you adore her on sight,” Luke Jennings wrote in The Observer. “Let us not exaggerate, but six stars seem to be in order,” Clement Crisp began in The Financial Times, adding, “Not since Plisetskaya and Maximova have we seen so adorable a Kitri and never one so divinely destined to claim the role as her own.”

Ms. Osipova, just 24, is now in demand by major ballet companies all over the world, and in Moscow she is an acknowledged star with a devoted following. But that wasn’t always a predictable fate for her, said Alexei Ratmansky, Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, who invited Ms. Osipova to join the Bolshoi during his tenure as the artistic director there.

“I watched the final exams at the Bolshoi school,” Mr. Ratmansky said, speaking on the phone from Jackson, Miss., where he was on the jury of the USA International Ballet Competition. “She got a lot of criticism from the examiners — not classical enough, no aesthetic, almost vulgar, just wrong,” he said. “But I felt you could see the physical talent and the openness, so I hired her.”

He gave her solo roles right from the outset. “There was a big division about her among the audience, and also among the dancers and coaches,” he said. “I don’t remember any dancer in my experience causing as much difference of opinion.”

Ms. Osipova’s extreme flexibility and steel-sprung jump — watching her hover in the air makes you realize how people felt when they saw Nijinsky — are quite possibly the legacy of her early training as a gymnast, which she began at 5 in Moscow, where she was born.

“I was very, very serious,” she said last week, speaking through a translator during an interview backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I saw myself at the Olympics. When I seriously injured my back at 8 or 9, and my teachers recommended I stop, this was a tragedy for me.”

Her parents took her to audition at the Bolshoi academy, hoping ballet would distract her. She was accepted but remained, she said, indifferent to dance for several years and wanted to return to gymnastics. Then she was given a solo to perform during a school show at the Bolshoi.

“Afterward the audience was applauding, and I understood that this is incredible,” she said. “In that moment I realized, yes, I want to dance.”

Offstage Ms. Osipova is wiry and feisty looking, with pale skin, wide-set eyes and jet-black tresses. (She dyes her light brown hair to correspond to her ballerina ideals: Margot Fonteyn, with whom she shares a birthday, May 18, and Diana Vishneva, also a Ballet Theater guest artist.) Onstage she is a theater animal for whom the presence and attention of the public is the oxygen that she needs to come fully alive.

It seems unsurprising that one of her heroes is the similarly avid Rudolf Nureyev, whose “Romeo and Juliet” with Fonteyn is, she said, the single performance she would most like to have seen. Ms. Osipova described Juliet as her “dream role”; next month, she will dance it with David Hallberg and Ballet Theater.

“I am a very emotional person, and those emotions have to go somewhere,” she said. “So I am always happy when I have a role where my feelings can come into play. Of course sometimes I scare people. They say, Natasha” — Ms. Osipova’s nickname — “you’re crazy. But I have to go out onstage and give everything I have.”

Mr. Hallberg, who has danced with Ms. Osipova at the Bolshoi as well as in New York, said their performances together had been among the greatest experiences of his career.

“She doesn’t care what people think,” he said. “She is so artistically involved in each role that she is continually questioning, validating every moment. She taught me to release a lot of my inhibitions, just through our physical communication.”

Ms. Osipova, who was invited to perform with Ballet Theater by its artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, after he saw her on tape, said that she was extremely happy at the Bolshoi, where she was promoted to principal in May. But a ballerina in the 21st century, she added, has the opportunity to travel and experience the repertory and schooling of different companies.

The crime of different countries is an unpleasant extra; after the mugging, close to her rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she said she was simply relieved that only her face had been bruised. “It was so quick that I think I felt more shock the next day,” she said. “But now I am thinking only about my first performance of ‘The Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

After just a few performances with Ballet Theater, it seems clear that Ms. Osipova’s technical gifts have raised the bar several notches higher for every other ballerina.

“If someone that talented comes out, it influences the dancers around her, and the younger ones,” Mr. Ratmansky said. “After her there was a wave of physical talent coming from the Bolshoi school. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”

Asked if he would like Ms. Osipova to join Ballet Theater’s roster of principal dancers, Mr. McKenzie said in an e-mail message that he “had that objective in mind.” Ms. Osipova said that while she would love to have a more permanent link to the company, her home was at the Bolshoi, where, she said, she felt she hadn’t yet fulfilled her potential. But she sounded touchingly girlish when talking of Ballet Theater.

“As little kids in school we were just thrilled looking at the stars of A.B.T.,” she said. “And now I’m walking next to them. It’s phenomenal.”

Natalia Osipova performs in “The Sleeping Beauty” on Saturday and “Romeo and Juliet” on July 10 with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, abt.org.

Natalia Osipova

Natalia Osipova as Kitri in a Bolshoi production of Don Q

The New York Times
Dance Review
Sending an Old Dreamer Airborne
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: June 4, 2010

“Dancing as Kitri in “Don Quixote” on Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Opera House, Natalia Osipova proved herself the most sensational ballerina now before the public. Kitri was the first major role for which Ms. Osipova — a Russian star of the Bolshoi Ballet, now in her second spring season as guest artist with American Ballet Theater —earned international acclaim. It’s clear why. She has a gamine quality; you can imagine this Kitri as the most riveting of street urchins. And she’s a theater animal. …”

The complete review can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/arts/dance/05osipova.html?scp=2&sq=Natalia%20Osipova&st=cse

The New York Times
Arts Briefly
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
June 15, 2010

Star Ballerina Attacked Near Lincoln Center

Two muggers attacked Natalia Osipova, right, a major international ballet star, as she left an American Ballet Theater performance early Tuesday morning, striking her in the nose and stealing her bag, her agent said. Ms. Osipova had attended a performance of Ballet Theater’s “Sleeping Beauty,” in which she is scheduled to dance on Saturday night, at the Metropolitan Opera House and was crossing Amsterdam Avenue on her way home when she was mugged, said the agent, Sergei Danilian. “Two guys just came from her back and they hit her and they took her bag,” he said. “She was so brave and so smart — she didn’t scream,” he said of the 5-foot-4 ballerina. Ms. Osipova had left her money at home and her computer at the Met, but the muggers got away with her point shoes and a small hammer used to shape them. The Met doctor was to examine her on Tuesday, Mr. Danilian said, and would determine whether she could dance full-out during an afternoon rehearsal or would just walk through it. She will “absolutely, no doubt,” perform on Saturday, he said. The police also interviewed her at the Met, he said. Ms. Osipova, who is Russian, is a star of the Bolshoi Ballet and in her second season as a guest artist with Ballet Theater.

Personal Comment: The good news is she wasn’t hurt and only lost some pointe shoes. If Sal had still been living on the upper west side that wouldn’t have happened! No dancers or other performers at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall would have been dissed like that in Sal’s territory. The Don who is responsible for that area should be ashamed of himself!

Ballet costumiers challenges

NYCB seamstress copying a costume

The New York Times
June 14, 2010
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

The Fresh Tutu Brigade

“If there is a heaven for people in the costume industry, it surely includes an infinite walk-in closet: one-stop shopping no matter the fabric, historical period or one-of-a-kind button needed.

For Marc Happel, director of New York City Ballet’s costume shop, reality is somewhat more challenging. He and his staff are charged with rebuilding costumes made years or decades ago, sometimes with materials that have long since gone out of style or production. Meanwhile, shrinking budgets, rising costs and an imperiled garment district make it increasingly difficult to keep City Ballet’s vast repertory looking fresh.

With seven costume-intense premieres this season, Mr. Happel and his staff have been on creation overdrive. But the work of maintaining existing ballets never ends. Audiences will see one of the shop’s major rebuilds this week in Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony” (1952), the costumes’ lush black bodices, originally designed by the illustrious Barbara Karinska, remade after years of wear and tear.

“Different variations of the velvet have been used to alter them,” Mr. Happel said, the repairs leading to a mishmash of not-quite-right fabrics. But replacing the bodices meant the sleeves and handmade trim had to be redone too, with special attention paid to Karinska’s detail work. “It just became a much bigger project than initially we thought,” Mr. Happel said.

In the best of times, securing the right materials is quite a task, and shoppers like Tracey Herman, Mr. Happel’s assistant, delight in the thrill of the hunt. But over the last 15 years or so, as clothing manufacturing has shifted overseas and rising Manhattan rents have forced small businesses out, she and her colleagues have had fewer places to look.

“It used to be there were 10 button stores you would go to, and now there are two,” she said. “What the stores are selling more of tends to be mass produced, imported, not as high quality, and maybe catering to a different fashion sensibility.”

You might think that the Internet would be a paradise for costume makers and that new technologies would yield ingenious ways to recreate extinct patterns and dyes. Digital printing does allow for the cost-effective replication of old hand-painted patterns on fabric, sites like eBay occasionally yield finds, and authentic specialty items can be found on the Web. But the industry remains a largely local, personal one.

“It’s a very 19th-century art form,” said Jared Aswegan, owner of Barbara Matera, which makes costumes for performing arts groups ranging from circuses to American Ballet Theater. There’s no substitute, he said, for holding material in your hands. “Actually being able to see it and feel it and understand what it is that you’re getting, you really can’t get a sense of that on the Internet.”

What you see online isn’t always what you get in person, which leads to further delays. And time is a luxury costumiers seldom have, especially midseason. Mr. Happel mentioned one business, on the brink of folding, that sells his shop many everyday supplies.

“We are a little freaked out by that, because that means now what we have to do is get stuff shipped from California,” he said. No more sending a staff member down to 36th Street.

Of course, resourceful shoppers have their secret stashes. Ms. Herman remains in touch with many of the merchants who closed their doors permanently, no longer able to afford Manhattan. Some of them keep stock at home. (Only a very few moved to other boroughs.)

“Now we just call them, and we either get a box in the mail or we don’t,” she explained, but only as long as those supplies last. And then? “That’s a good question,” she said, laughing. “Certainly you can always get things made, but it becomes at what price and are the tools and the material even available anymore?”

Trades go out of style too. Marcia Ceppos, who runs Tinsel Trading, which her grandfather started in 1933, said that younger generations aren’t particularly interested in running family businesses. (Ms. Ceppos has no children and is unsure of Tinsel’s future.) And Mr. Aswegan is beginning an internship program for skills like sewing and embroidery, which he says are “heading onto the endangered species list” as people look to more lucrative careers.

The sour economy has only exacerbated these trends. Many remaining garment district stores are reinventing themselves to stay afloat: Tinsel Trading has diversified its stock, while Mood Fabrics has benefited from its association with the television show “Project Runway” and started its own production company, Preview Textile Group, to better cater to the needs of small, belt-tightening designers.

The strategy, said Eric Sauma, one of the owners of the family-run Mood, is to focus “on our smaller designers, who just need small yardages, and be able to grow with them.” He noted that many of his smallest customers were bringing production back to the United States — cause for hope, he said.

Costume shop budgets are shrinking too. Ballet Theater, which outsources all of its costume work, started the Costume Fund in 2003 for restoration purposes. Mr. Happel said he was hoping for big donors for ambitious rebuilding projects like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which still has its original 1962 Karinska-designed costumes.

Meanwhile, the show must go on, and costumiers have many masters to please. Beyond designers and choreographers, balletomanes have long memories and strong ideas about what a costume should look like. And dancers often become attached to, and even slightly superstitious about, old costumes, preferring to deal with disrepair and sweat stains than to break in new versions.

Yet they can see the difference. On a recent Thursday morning the corps member Faye Arthurs, who was being fitted for a new “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” costume, exclaimed with pleasure over the subtle range of colors in her new tutu.

Mr. Happel nodded in somewhat harried agreement before hurrying off to a storage closet, where row upon row of diaphanous, bejeweled costume hung.

“I walk through here a lot by myself,” he said. “It’s exciting, you see the history of this company in all its costumes. It’s also frustrating, because I see all there is to do.””

Personal comment: Our costumiers have a lot of the same problems with sweat and wear, but we have only had a ballet Co for 8 years and for most of that time rented costumes. It’s been only in the last three years that we opened our own costume shop to make costumes rather than to do minor repairs on rental ones. We have some really talented costumiers we lured away from Hollywood because they wanted a more stable career and the big studios were shedding most of their costume shop capacity. Even with the dip in revenue from the recent recession I’ve been able to hold on to the talent and not had to skimp on the materials for costumes, though many of the showgirl costumes themselves are pretty skimpy. Only rarely do we have a costume disaster where a girl bleeds through her tights and tutu. One nice thing about a strippers costume is that the outer costume; coats, skirts, tops etc come off early in the performance so there isn’t really that much wear and the performance lingerie that gets soaked in sweat - or ripped off if the girl is working the house - isn’t that expensive to repair or replace.

Natalia Makarova and La Bayadère

Mariinsky Ballet La Bayadère Alina Somova as Nikiya in Act 2 scene 5 ‘the Kingdom of the Shades’

The New York Times
Dance
May 10, 2010
By ROSLYN SULCAS

The Eternal Godmother of ‘La Bayadère’

ONE by one, clad in diaphanous white, they enter to a flowing adagio musical phrase. One arm is stretched forward toward infinity, one leg stretched back to create a glorious arabesque line; then each ghostly figure arches backward, arms framing the head like a halo. The phrase is repeated over and over, the line of dancers winding across the stage in seemingly never-ending serpentine progression: a poetic image of eternity, of order, symmetry, harmony, of classical ballet itself.

This famous sequence is the opening of the Shades scene in “La Bayadère,” originally choreographed in 1877 by Marius Petipa for the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg. The ballet — a tale of a young Indian temple dancer, or bayadère, betrayed by her warrior lover and poisoned by her rival —was an immediate hit. Through various stagings and revisions, it remained a Russian repertory staple over the next century, as familiar to audiences and dancers as “Swan Lake” or “Giselle.”

When American Ballet Theater gets its Metropolitan Opera House season under way with “Bayadère” on Tuesday night, the audience might well feel the same way; the ballet (and a one-act version, “The Kingdom of the Shades”) is danced by so many major ballet companies that it has become part of the pantheon of 19th-century works that, for many, define an idea of classical dance.

In fact it has been just 30 years — almost to the day on Tuesday — that the full-length “Bayadère” was seen for the first time in the West. It was staged for Ballet Theater by Natalia Makarova, the great Russian ballerina who defected to the West in 1970. Like Rudolf Nureyev before her, she brought not just her inimitable dancing but also a heritage: a trove of knowledge of the classics that she had danced throughout her Kirov career.

Remarkably, since Ms. Makarova’s sole experience of staging was setting the “Shades” act for Ballet Theater in 1974, she mounted the elaborate production for Ballet Theater, where she was a principal dancer, almost single-handedly.

On the opening night she danced the main role of the bayadère Nikiya for the first time, with the British dancer Antony Dowell as Solor, the warrior who loves her but is compelled to marry the Rajah’s daughter Gamzatti.

“When I was dancing in Russia, I never prepared for this,” Ms. Makarova said this month after rehearsals at Ballet Theater’s studios near Union Square.

“But I had come to America, I was dancing all these modern works with Ballet Theater, and I looked at the company, at the people, that eclectic repertoire. At that time dancers didn’t know the differences in port de bras, épaulement, the right line, using the whole body in harmony. I had a desire to give to them what I know.”

Ms. Makarova, has lost none of her stringency about that heritage over 30 years of Bayadère rehearsals. (Her version is by far the most popular, with 14 productions worldwide, including the Royal Ballet, the Ballet de Santiago, the Australian Ballet and the Tokyo Ballet. But there are others, including Rudolf Nureyev’s lavish 1992 production for the Paris Opera Ballet and stagings by Vladimir Malakhov, Patrice Bart, Florence Clerc and Stanton Welch.)

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head during a rehearsal of the corps dancers, as they began a phrase for the umpteenth time. “Don’t like.” The pianist stopped abruptly, the dancers slumped, looking weary. Ms. Makarova walked over to the first row. “You are doing too much,” she said, imitating an overly lifted chin as she framed her head with circled arms. “It should be spiritual, not emotional.”

They tried the phrase again. “Better,” she said. “But not good yet.”

As the dancers filed out, she explained: “I don’t want to be too hard on them. They have just come back from a week’s break.”

Later Ms. Makarova, who at 69 still looks every inch the ballerina (and who casually lifted her leg above her shoulder while demonstrating in rehearsal), recalled how hard it had been to teach the dancers the nuances of the style she wanted. “We really started from the beginning,” she said. “How to hold a finger. It wasn’t a technical issue, but one of expressiveness. It was a revelation for them, the moment they got it. Of course there was a lot of emotion, because I demand a lot.”

Cynthia Harvey, who danced Gamzatti at the premiere, remembers Ms. Makarova as a tough, but inspiring coach.

“There were times when I wanted to burst into tears, but I understood that this was an education of a whole new kind,” she said, speaking from her home near Norwich, England. “How she used point work was a revelation to me, the way she rolled through her feet both up and down. How you carry your arms, where the head goes. It was a whole other level of refinement that isn’t even necessarily appreciated today.”

Ms. Makarova based her “Bayadère” on the original Petipa production, which included a final act that showed the gods’ destruction of the temple as Solor and Gamzatti are married. The 1941 version that she had danced at the Kirov, staged by Vladimir Ponomaryov and Vakhtang Chabukiani, had omitted this scene, as had all post-Petipa stagings.

“From my point of view there was not enough logic and conclusion without the final scene,” she said. “There is a crime, and there must be punishment, dramatically it must work that way.”

Her research on the ballet was hampered, she said, by cold war politics; she managed “with great difficulty” to acquire the Minkus score (later arranged by John Lanchberry) and found reviews of the original ballet in the Sergeyev Collection at Harvard, which gave her an idea of the atmosphere of the Petipa era.

Ms. Makarova was no purist, however. She pared away a number of dances, moved the Bronze Idol solo (a post-Petipa interpolation) to the last act, and choreographed a new solo for Gamzatti, and a new scene for Solor, just before he sees the vision of the Shades.

“Sometimes those old war horses need adjustment,” said Mr. Dowell, in New York to rehearse the company last month. “Natasha’s version really works because of its economy — the scene changes, the way it moves. She used what she knew, but she was able to let go of the past too.”

“La Bayadère” was a huge popular success at its May 18, 1980, premiere. “La Bayadère,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Post, "is the culmination of Ballet Theater’s 40 year-old history.”

Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times that it was “a superspectacle in the grandest of grand opera house traditions.” She didn’t mean this in an entirely positive way. “This “Bayadère” sets ballet back by 70 years,” Ms. Kisselgoff commented later in the review.

Critics have continued to feel the same mixture of love and annoyance with “Bayadère”: “No matter which production of this full-length ballet you see, at least 60 percent of it is trash,” Alastair Macaulay wrote in The Times in 2008. “Alternately entertaining and pompous, invariably spectacular, generally formulaic, musically trite and (the setting is India) an anthropologist’s nightmare.”

Audiences apparently don’t care. And Ms. Makarova offers a spirited argument for why not.

“The story is Shakespearean,” she said. “About eternal things: love, jealousy, betrayal, retribution, the choice between love and duty. As humans, we are always interested in this.”

Georgina Parkinson, Star at Royal Ballet, Dies at 71

Georgina Parkinson rehearsing dancers in New York in 2005.

The New York Times
December 19, 2009

Georgina Parkinson, Star at Royal Ballet, Dies at 71
By ANNA KISSELGOFF

“Georgina Parkinson, a ballet mistress and coach at American Ballet Theater whose compelling stage presence and brooding mystery had made her a bright young star of Britain’s Royal Ballet in the 1960s, died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 71.

The cause was complications of cancer, said her son, Tobias Round. Ms. Parkinson lived in Manhattan.

Although her training was in the Royal’s textbook classical style, Ms. Parkinson made her breakthrough in “Les Biches,” an experimental work of 1924 revived for the Royal in 1964 by Bronislava Nijinska.

A dark-haired beauty of striking femininity, Ms. Parkinson nonetheless captured the strong androgyny of the central figure, the Girl in Blue. Coached for weeks by Nijinska, she was widely acclaimed for her unsettling portrayal in the ballet’s commentary on social and sexual mores.

By her own account, Ms. Parkinson was more at home in 20th-century narrative ballets than in the 19th-century classics: she was Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake” and danced the title role in “Raymonda,” in which Clive Barnes, writing in 1969 in The New York Times, called her “golden and glowing.”

Georgina Parkinson was born in Brighton, England, on Aug. 20, 1938. As a child in a convent school, she took a ballet class every Tuesday. Noticing her talent, the school’s nuns suggested to her parents that she pursue further training. After studying with a local teacher, she was admitted to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet school and joined the Royal in 1957.
Despite her respect for the classics, she found her best opportunities in new works. She was in the original cast of Frederick Ashton’s pure-dance “Monotones I” and showed off her dramatic side in his “Enigma Variations,” inspired by the composer Edward Elgar.

Kenneth MacMillan created the role of the Austrian archduke’s mother for her in “Mayerling” and cast her in many of his other ballets. Her Juliet in his “Romeo and Juliet” in New York in 1968 was a stricken heroine, doomed from the start.

In 1978 Ms. Parkinson was invited by Nora Kaye, a former Ballet Theater ballerina, to teach company class for Ballet Theater. By then, Ms. Parkinson had begun to perform character roles, which she continued to do later at Ballet Theater. In 1979 she returned for a year to London to be with her family.

Besides her son, Tobias, of London, who is married to Leanne Benjamin, a Royal Ballet ballerina, Ms. Parkinson is survived by her husband, the photographer Roy Round; a grandson, Thomas; and a sister, Maureen Seiger, of Tel Aviv.

In 1980 Ms. Parkinson returned to Ballet Theater as ballet mistress and continued in that role until recently. This fall she was asked to coach the actresses Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in a new Darren Aronofsky film, “Black Swan,” a thriller set in the world of New York City ballet.

Julie Kent, the Ballet Theater principal who worked most closely with her, said on Friday that Ms. Parkinson had helped her “develop my physicality to the point where I was able to express what was inside of me to a larger audience.”

“I learned everything from her,” Ms. Kent said.”